Please think about this for a moment
If Haydn had patented "a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]", Mozart would have been in trouble.
Unlike copyright, patents can block independent creations. Software patents can render software copyright useless. One copyrighted work can be covered by hundreds of patents of which the author doesn't even know but for whose infringement he and his users can be sued. Some of these patents may be impossible to work around, because they are broad or because they are part of communication standards.
These patents are already GRANTED against the letter and spirit of the existing laws in the EU:
- Electronic shopping cart: collect buyable items in a list and buy all of them at the end
- Language learning by comparing one's pronounciation to that of a teacher: this covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronounciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronounciation
- Testing learned material in schools: use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The "technical contributions" consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently.
- Generating buying incentives from cooking recipes: calculate lists of things to buy with buying instructions, based on cooking recipes specified by a user. The "technical contribution" lies in the fact that a printer and a monitor are used
- Amazon gift ordering: if you want to program your online shop so that it delivers your articles as gifts to a third person specified by the customer, you might want to negotiate with Amazon Inc for a license
- Intuitive network configuration: covers all user-friendly network administration tools that are yet to be written
- Dynamically extensible web server: seems to cover any webserver that processes HTML forms and invokes a program via a common gateway interface, such that this program returns a webpage
- Method and computer program product for displaying objects from overlapping windows: IBM fought hard for this patent and even pushed the EPO Technical Board of Appeal to create a precedent in 1998 for violating Art 52 EPC in order to get claims to a "computer program product" granted. The teaching itself is abstract, functional and trivial
- And many, many more...